


Weathering the Storm

by FeatherWriter



Category: Cosmere - Brandon Sanderson, Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bad Weather, Cuddling & Snuggling, Cute, F/M, Fluff, Shallarin, Social Awkwardness, Storms, Warm and Fuzzy Feelings, library date
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-08
Updated: 2017-06-08
Packaged: 2018-11-10 18:35:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11132457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FeatherWriter/pseuds/FeatherWriter
Summary: A college AU fic in which Shallan finds her car stranded in a puddle on campus and must wait for the storm to pass with some unexpected company. Despite the fact that this is an AU, it is “post-WoR” and so some parallel events have occured! Read at your own risk!





	Weathering the Storm

Shallan pounded her palms against the steering wheel, the loud crashes of thunder outside seeming a perfect counterpoint to the frustrated curses that she’d been letting out for the past fifteen minutes. It was no use. That puddle had been quite a bit deeper than she’d expected and no matter what she might do to try to convince her car to move, her wheels were just spinning and tossing more water into the air.

She was already sopping wet from the two previous attempts at shoving the car to somewhere that it’d be able to gain traction, and she wasn’t expecting a third would do her any good. But what else could she do? She was already going to be late—which she hated—but she most certainly wasn’t going to be late without trying everything.

She opened her door and stepped back outside, a small gasp escaping as the ice-cold rain drenched her again. Sitting in her car, out of the wind, being wet wasn’t so bad, but out here it was numbingly cold. The water came up over her ankles it was so deep. She’d just started rounding the back of her car when she heard someone splashing out to meet her. She could make out the silhouette of an umbrella but not much else in the heavy rain and the gloom of the storm.

“You need to get inside!” the stranger called out over the noise. The voice sounded male, but she didn’t recognize it. “There’s a flash flood warning!”

Shallan glanced down at the veritable lake around her feet. “No kidding! I can’t leave my car! I need to be somewhere!”

“This entire section of campus is flooded, you’re not going to get anywhere! It’s not safe to be outside!”

Whoever he was, he was probably right. And besides, she was already almost half an hour late to her appointment. With weather like this, it would probably just be better to not show up, much as the thought of skipping made her want to grind her teeth. She’d try to get a call out if she managed to find somewhere dry, though these storms tended to knock out reception with surprising consistency.

Feeling quite a bit like she was giving up, Shallan turned to follow her companion, who led them back across a waterlogged lawn to a large building as quickly as he could while trying to keep the both of them under the umbrella. She appreciated the gesture, but seeing as they were both already soaked through, she wasn’t sure it was doing much good. The wind was whipping about so fiercely that the rain could hardly be said to have been falling _down_ at all.

The umbrella’s futility came to a peak as a particularly powerful gust wrenched it free from the boy’s hand, causing him to cry out, though whether in surprise or pain from the way the wind twisted it, Shallan couldn’t tell. The umbrella flipped inside out for a moment before the plastic-like fabric tore through, leaving the device in shreds. With nothing to protect them from the harrowing onslaught of storm, the two quickly broke into a full sprint for the door. There was a large flight of wide-stepped stairs leading up to the building, with a stately column-supported covered patio at the top. He reached the door first, and quickly held the it open for her.

The heavy wooden door closed behind them with a thud, though an aptly timed crash of thunder made it seem like the storm had shut them in. Shallan took a moment to catch her breath, the sudden quiet of being indoors seemed shocking. The rain still splattered against the window frames, and aftershocks of thunder rolled outside, but they were muffled. Much more so than they had been in her car.

“Are you okay?”

Shallan stiffened just slightly, as, in the absence of the noise and chaos of the storm, she finally recognized who exactly had come to her rescue. She glanced sideways, visually confirming what his voice had already clued her in on.

Renarin.

She felt a wave of something like guilty awkwardness, settling on her with a faint sense of nausea. She hadn’t spoken with Renarin since the finals week of previous semester, and their last meeting hadn’t exactly gone smoothly. The two had been assigned as group members on a final project, that terrifying sort of presentation that would be graded with every measure of strictness and counted for 50% of the class grade.The day they were to present, Renarin had fallen ill, and had been feverish to the point of delusions. He’d tried to show up to class and push through the presentation anyway, but all Shallan had been able to see was that he was ruining things and was going to make them fail.

She had been… less than compassionate with him when she’d seen what was going on, but she’d been under that overwhelmingly stressful pressure of trying to make it through the semester with her GPA intact. He had been a complication, something that was getting in the way of her success and dragging her down, and she was only slightly embarrassed to say that she had treated him as such. Now, faced with him after the entire holiday break between them and that event, she was torn between wanting to apologize for what she’d said to him back then and not wanting to bring it up again.

Her desire to avoid awkward conversation topics led her to choose the latter. “I…” In the shock of seeing him, it took her a moment to recall what he had asked her. “Yes, I’m alright. Soaked to the bone, but I’ll survive. Sometimes I think this town was named ‘Shattered Plains’ because of all the lightning strikes from these freak storms.”

Renarin gave a faint smile, but there was something guarded in his eyes. Was he feeling the awkwardness of their last encounter hanging over him as well? She wondered if he’d known it was her out in the rain when he’d decided to come to her rescue. Would he have left her stranded if he’d recognized her? A somewhat unpleasant thought, that.

“I’m just used to the storms, I suppose,” he said in his characteristically quiet way. Perhaps that was why she hadn’t recognized his voice out in the storm: she hadn’t ever heard him shouting before. “Sometimes I forget that not everywhere has storms like we do.”

“Jah Keved’s only six hours north of here, but we certainly don’t get storms this bad.” With a small sigh, she ran her hands through her hair. Or made an attempt to do so at least, as the wet and wind had made it a mess of tangles for her. “I have a feeling I’m not going to make that meeting with my mentor.”

He gave her a slightly confused look, then slowly said: “I’m sure cousin Jasnah will be understanding with you.”

 _Cousin._ Right. How could she have forgotten that he was related to Jasnah? Everyone in town, even students like her from out of state who were just there for school, knew of the Kholin family. When Shallan had landed this apprenticeship with Dr. Jasnah Kholin, she hadn’t expected to find that the rest of the woman’s family to all be as accomplished as she was. Jasnah’s uncle was a decorated general and war veteran, her mother was a renowned inventor. Her brother Elhokar was currently running for governor, just as his father had done. Both of her younger cousins were students at the university, and Adolin was one of the campus elite, involved in sports, popular, a strong student in all of his classes. Shallan had been on a few dates with Adolin, and he seemed like a very charming person, even though things hadn’t become serious.

But Renarin didn’t seem to fit. Despite Shallan’s involvement with his family, she didn’t often think of him as one of ‘the Kholins.’ He was the one who didn’t seem to fit with the ‘Kholin’ ideal. In a family full of impressive, dynamic people, Renarin was quiet and shy, if not awkward. Shallan, in speaking with him, had often thought he came across as creepy and weird, the way he paused before he spoke or seemed to think too deeply about something that should have been a simple conversation.

Then again, he _had_ been named one of the Radiant Scholars for last semester, the university’s most prestigious award. She herself had been one of the other recipients, though she’d kept the fact that she’d been in the running fairly quiet for most of the semester. Renarin had apparently kept his candidacy even quieter, because she didn’t find out about him until after the craziness of last semester’s finals had settled.

Searching for a source of conversation that wasn’t going to end in supreme awkwardness, Shallan turned, looking at her surroundings for the first time. She was surprised at what she found. Marble walls and columns, vaulted ceilings, numerous stained glass windows illuminated by the frequent flashes of lightning behind them. It looked more like a museum than a campus building.

“What is this place?”

Renarin stepped up beside her, looking upward as well. “This is the Palaneum library. It’s where the university stores their oldest and most valuable books. The mayor of Kharbranth donated a lot of money so that it could be built like this.”

“It’s beautiful,” Shallan said, turning as she stepped out into the middle of the foyer, trying to get a good look at all the carved façades running around the top of the walls. “I had no idea this was here.”

“Not many people do. It’s somewhat far from the residential halls most of the books here are so old that no one besides history and literature majors use them.” The way Renarin looked at the building, with a mixture of fondness and reverence, made Shallan reasses her opinion of the library. With Renarin, the Palaneum seemed less like a museum and more like a cathedral. “I’m surprised Jasnah never mentioned it,” he said. “It’s her favorite building on campus.”

Shallan shook her head slowly, still taking in the ornate sight. “No, she never has. Are we the only ones in here? Does this place usually stay open this late on the weekends?”

Renarin glanced down, somewhat sheepishly holding up a pair of keys. “It’s… technically not open right now.”

“How did you–”

“I’m a work study here,” he said with a small shrug. “The librarians know I like to come in here after hours when it’s quiet. Being alone with all the books is… calming, I guess. It helps me think clearly.”

Another shockingly loud peal of thunder rolled cut off any reply Shallan might have made, and she shivered. Her wet clothes made the chill seem that much more pronounced. Embarrassingly enough, she even sneezed, to complete the picture of the rain soaked heroine. _My literature teachers would have a fit with this image._

Renarin simply gave her a sympathetic smile. “Come on, you must be freezing. The librarians have one of those instant espresso machines in the back lounge room, if you’d like a cup of something warm.”

“That sounds lovely, actually.”

He started walking toward one of the doors, looking back over his shoulder to make sure she was following. “And the best part of having a group of middle-aged women working in a drafty cold-marble library with poor central heating?”

She raised an eyebrow in lieu of an actual question.

He grinned, just a tiniest bit. “They like to keep lots of blankets around.”

—

_He left money in the drawer._

Shallan cupped her mug in both hands, ensuring that no warmth from its ceramic surface escaped to the air rather than her hands as she worked that thought over. She watched him as he settled onto the couch next to her, wrapping himself up in a blanket stolen off the back of a librarian’s office chair. She had one of her own as well, and had swapped her sodden jacket for a sweater borrowed from one of the coat racks.

She couldn’t shake the thought about the money, however. As he’d said, he’d shown her the office espresso machine and let her pick out the flavor she wanted before taking one for himself. But he’d left money in the drawer afterwards. Two crisp bills, carefully unfolded from his wallet and placed inside with the flavor cups where they would be seen.

It was such a small thing. No one would know that Shallan and Renarin had had a cup of coffee each, and the things couldn’t cost more than a few cents each. But he’d done it anyway, overpaid for their little cups of powdered coffee and flavor, simply because it was the right thing to do.

She couldn’t think of very many other people who would have done such a thing. That meant something.

Pulling the blankets closer around her, she took another sip from her mug, glancing at the fire across from them. The dancing light threw flickering shadows over the scene as they sat. Figuring that they were both probably warm enough now that the metaphorical ice was thinned and melted, Shallan set about trying to break it.

“You know,” she said softly, “I don’t think there are many libraries on campus that have fireplaces.”

As seemed to be a trend with him, there was a pause before he spoke. “This building has a lot of… unconventional architecture, I suppose.”

She pulled one hand away from her mug and extended it toward the flames. “Well it certainly feels nice after being outside in all of this. I’m sure we’ll appreciate it if the power goes out as well.”

“I think there’s a backup generator somewhere on campus, actually. We would be fine.”

The way he said it wasn’t rude or as though he were trying to make her seem wrong, just a simple statement of fact. She’d quickly learned that he had a habit of doing things like that: ending a conversation with a single phrase, seemingly unintentionally. Not the easiest of people to chat with.

“I…” She paused, trying to decide how she wanted to phrase this. “I wanted to say thank you again, for coming to pull me out of the rain. I suppose I must be glad it was too dark for you to see who I actually was, since… I doubt you would have come if you’d known it was me.”

Renarin frowned slightly at that, turning to look at the rain still spattering against the stained glass windows. “This… isn’t a storm anyone should be caught outside in, Shallan.”

For some reason, that made her feel even more guilty than she’d been before. “I owe you an apology. The things I said to you last semester…”

Renarin turned back, his frown deepening as he shook his head. There was an awkward nervousness in his expression, almost edging upon fear. “You really don’t need to apologize.”

“Yes, I do,” she insisted, taking hold of his hand. “I was… awful and insensitive. I got stressed and I lost control over a presentation, a grade. Looking back on it now, I’m ashamed of my behavior. You didn’t deserve to have to deal with any of that.”

He glanced away, as though he were ashamed. She was the one laying herself out bare apologizing; what did he have to feel guilty about? “I don’t blame you for the things you said. I was messing things up and getting in the way. You had a right to be angry at me.”

“It doesn’t excuse the way I acted toward you,” she said. “I found out later how sick you were that day, and you tried to come do the presentation anyway. That was… really admirable, actually and I treated you terribly on top of what you were already dealing with. And now, you left your safe space to rescue a stranger from a storm who turned out to be… probably the last person you wanted to run into on campus. Even after that, you were kind to me and all of this, helping me get warm and letting me borrow blankets.”

She shook her head in disbelief as she continued. “You _paid_ for the coffee. That’s such a small thing, but I can’t stop thinking about it. No one would have ever known if you’d just taken the cups and used them. But you left money behind. This whole time all I’ve been able to think about is how guilty I feel now about what happened. So, you might say I don’t need to apologize, but I ardently disagree. Please, I need to say that I’m sorry for how I acted around you last semester. It wasn’t fair, and I feel terrible about it.”

His eyes had widened as she’d gone on, and he blinked under the inundation of apologies. Even after she stopped, he stayed quiet for a long while, to the point where she felt the silence growing awkward. Had she said the wrong thing? Was he upset that she’d brought last semester up again? She had such a hard time reading him, and she couldn’t tell what his reaction was.

Finally, just as she was about to think that heading back out into the rain might be her best choice, he nodded once, expression quirking into a small smile. “Thank you, Shallan. That… means a lot to me.”

He glanced down between them, and she realized her hand was still atop his. She thought about taking it back – perhaps he didn’t want her touching him. Then, with a shy kind of slowness, he gently squeezed her hand, and smiled at her. She smiled back, giving a bit tighter of a squeeze.

“You know…” she said slowly. “We’d probably warm up faster if we were a bit closer.”

He blushed, and there was something Shallan thought was endearing about the way he looked when he was embarrassed. “That might… be a good idea.”

Gentleness seemed to be a good idea around him, so she carefully scooted closer and leaned up against him. He went just slightly stiff for a moment, then relaxed, leaning against her as well. She started to ask him about small things, his classes, his interests, and they simply started talking, using each other’s company to pass the time.

Shallan had the distinct impression that she was going to fall asleep like this, curled up with something soft and someone warm, watching the fire flicker and dance and light the room as the rain tapped against the window panes around them, and she couldn’t bring herself to think of a better way to spend the evening.


End file.
